iPhone: ‘It’s the user experience, stupid’

The best thing to come out of this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona has to be David Benjamin’s account in EE Times of a “blue-ribbon panel of human behavior and technology experts” struggling to understand the success of Apple’s AAPL iPhone.

You would have thought that the title of the panel — It’s the User Experience, Stupid — would have told the experts all they needed to know.

And according to Benjamin the panelists did agree that the iPhone — 77 percent of whose users described themselves in a market survey as “very satisfied” — represented a model for other mobile handset makers to follow.

But the fun starts when they try to apply the lessons of Apple’s success. Benjamin writes:

One direction, advocated by Lucia Predolin, international marketing and communications director for Buongiorno S.p.A. of Milan, Italy, is to manipulate users by identifying their “need states” — including such compulsions as “killing time,” and “making the most of it” — and fulfilling them subliminally.